You might have seen our past broadcast about how you can develop branding guidelines for your business.
What you might not know is we have been using a pretty bare-bones style tile for our own branding guidelines for awhile.
Unfortunately not only was it keeping us from being consistent and being able to work with people effectively on tasks, but it was also keeping us from finishing some big goals like redesigning our website.
So if you’re the kind of person who isn’t liking what an employee/intern is producing in terms of marketing collateral if you feel like your materials aren’t consistent, or you feel really daunted about big projects like redoing your business cards or business website, it might be time to finally take on this task.
This was our process with Jessica and Nicole working part time for threeish months:
1) Jessica delved into design, both UX and graphic design to understand some of the larger principles of design. Here are resources she found helpful in learning:
https://www.youtube.com/c/GarethDavidStudio
Meanwhile, Nicole grabbed a Canva Branding Guidelines template to start with and started inputting content (who knew she had five different things to say about selecting icons!?) and began writing things down.
2) Jessica and Nicole began a relationship in the comments of Canva where Jessica asked questions, Nicole clarified, and Jessica began laying out our branding guidelines. Jessica asks who our customers are, Nicole realizes she uses emojis sometimes but when are they used?
3) Revisions were continued with a couple meetings in real-time and in the comments of Canva.
4) At some point, we have to call this ‘good enough’ and put a revision date on the cover, which not only communicates when it was produced but a commitment to revisit on occasion and revise.
We recommend:
– Having an honest working relationship.
– Not taking feedback personally.
– When you aren’t sure what to pick, rank your choices on some kind of scale so you can compare. (This helped us finally pick our fonts.)
– Having a seasoned and new person work on this together (at least two people is helpful).
In other words, it was a journey but like most journeys, was totally worth it. And if you need some help, we made our template available if you give us your email address here: https://breakingeveninc.com/branding
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Resources mentioned:
https://thenounproject.com